Educating the educators

In today's reading from the collected works of St. Obvious of Duh, we have: a study out of the University of Vermont showing that students get substandard science education if their teachers are not trained in science.

This apparently is some kind of revelation.  What they did was to look at the use of inquiry-based instruction in eighth-grade science classes, and they found that the use of inquiry methods varied directly with the teacher's level of formal education in science.  Hearteningly, they found that teachers with little science background can eventually catch up with their better-educated peers -- if they are mentored by teachers who themselves have a solid foundation of understanding how science works.

Lest you think I'm overstating my case, here's what the authors -- Tammy Kolbe and Simon Jorgenson -- write:

For two decades, science teachers have been encouraged to orient their instruction around the practices of scientific inquiry; however, it is unclear whether teachers have the knowledge and skills to do so.  In this study, we draw upon data from the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress to examine the extent to which eighth-grade science teachers’ educational backgrounds are related to using inquiry-oriented instruction.  We focus on aspects of teachers’ educational backgrounds that are most frequently used by teacher education programs and state licensing agencies as proxies for teachers’ content knowledge and professional preparation to teach science.  We find that teachers’ educational backgrounds, especially in science and engineering disciplines and science education, are associated with differences in the extent to which teachers engage in inquiry-oriented instruction, regardless of teaching experience.  Findings suggest that teachers’ educational backgrounds are relevant considerations as standards-based efforts to reform science instruction in middle-level classrooms move forward.

What baffles me is that anyone is surprised by this.  It's not like you would be shocked to find out that a person's level of expertise in architecture and engineering predicted how likely it was that the house (s)he designed would fall down.  Why did they even need a study to show this?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gulliver Schools, Gulliver academy, CC BY 2.5]

The sad fact is that we're facing a shortage of well-trained science teachers.  This itself is not to be wondered at.  In the last ten years, we've heard teachers and teachers' unions demonized by politicians and talking heads whose last stay in a public school classroom was when they were in twelfth grade.  Teachers are derided as lazy slackers who only became teachers because they couldn't hack it in a "real" profession.  Unions get clobbered for protecting lousy teachers from getting fired -- tenure as immunity from the consequences of incompetence.

It's appalling how inaccurate this all is.  Even though the market for competent science teachers is getting woefully thin, the majority of us are doing whatever we're able to.  The fact is, I've taught in high schools for the last 31 years, and the truly bad teachers stand out in my memory primarily because they're so uncommon.  Most teachers work their asses off to provide their students with the best education they can.  They are committed professionals, who put in so much more time than the eight-to-three class schedule that it's a wonder any of us have a private life.

But honestly, I don't blame college graduates for choosing a career path other than teaching.  If I was a 2018 graduate, no way in hell would I become a teacher, and that's speaking as a veteran who (honestly) has had an overall awesome experience.  Why would you join a profession where you are working like crazy, while constantly facing salary, staffing, and budget cuts (to the extent that I purchase about a quarter of the lab supplies we use out of my own pocket), and still are portrayed negatively in the media?

So the University of Vermont study is correct, but is looking only at the surface of the problem.  The better question is: why are any students in eighth-grade science classes being taught by teachers with no background in science?  We wouldn't accept this in any other profession; why do we accept it here?

It's not an easy question to answer.  Here in New York, a lot of it has to do with the arcane funding formula, which bases part of school funding from state aid and the rest from local property taxes.  Since districts vary tremendously in the tax base, this creates huge inequities in funding -- it's unsurprising that rich districts in Westchester County have well-fitted-out, state-of-the-art science classrooms, and here in upstate New York I've more than once had to run to the store in the middle of the day to restock some lab supply we've run out of.  Even worse, school districts are forced by the funding formula into the solution of cutting the biggest-ticket item they have control over -- staffing.  Cutting staff (usually on a last-in, first-out basis) bumps up class sizes, another factor that affects how successful teaching is -- it is, quite simply, impossible to do deep, far-reaching, inquiry-based teaching in a class of 35 kids.  (No exaggeration; my first class ever in my career was 35 seventh-graders, in a classroom with 32 desks.  I had kids sitting on the lab tables.)

The result is a terrible synergy -- overcrowded classrooms, overworked teachers, poor working conditions, denigration in the press, budget cuts, and a thinning population of qualified applicants.  Why should we be surprised at poor outcomes for students?

The worst part is that this problem is a snake swallowing its own tail.  A generation of poorly-educated science students leads to a generation of poorly-educated science teachers, and on and on it goes.  However, until quality education starts being the first priority of voters -- and therefore, the first priority of politicians -- nothing's going to change.

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The Skeptophilia book-of-the-week for this week is Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos.  If you've always wondered about such abstruse topics as quantum mechanics and Schrödinger's Cat and the General Theory of Relativity, but have been put off by the difficulty of the topic, this book is for you.  Greene has written an eloquent, lucid, mind-blowing description of some of the most counterintuitive discoveries of modern physics -- and all at a level the average layperson can comprehend.  It's a wild ride -- and a fun read.

Mattresses, crude oil, and superpowers

Given the ongoing lunacy happening in the United States right now, I find it strangely comforting when I find out that there are people doing stupid stuff in other countries, too.

Take, for example, the Korean radioactive mattresses.  As reported in the Korea JoongAng Daily, it turns out that seven mattress manufacturers have been found in violation of standards for allowable radiation level in products meant for human use.

How, you might ask, could not one, nor two, but seven companies be simultaneously producing mattresses that bathe you in the warm glow of alpha radiation?  Turns out that there's a pseudoscientific alt-med belief over there that anything producing negative ions is good for you (meaning, of course, that positive ions are bad).  Given that bases have an excess of hydroxyl (OH-) ions, if this were true it would mean that a concentrated solution of Drano would be just the most healthful thing ever.

But little things like "facts" and "science" never dissuade people from espousing this sort of idea, so these mattress manufacturers decided to negative-ionify their mattresses by sprinkling the stuffing with powdered monazite.  Monazite, for you non-geological types, is a mineral primarily composed of cerium/thorium phosphate.

Thorium, you probably know, is highly radioactive.  When it decays, it not only produces alpha particles, but the "decay series" ends up producing the element radon, which is not only more radioactive, is a gas, so it can be inhaled -- and has been linked to increasing your risk of lung cancer.

So using one of these mattresses is taking the chance of seriously compromising your health.  It will not, unfortunately, result in your getting superpowers or becoming the Korean version of the Incredible Hulk.

Oh, wait.  That was gamma rays, not alpha particles.  Never mind.

Then we've got the resort town of Naftalan, in Azerbaijan, which has a spa in which you can do wonderful things for your skin -- by taking a bath in heated crude oil.

At this point, I feel obliged to state outright that I'm not making either of these stories up.  The people running the resort said, "It smells like sulfur, but feels like salvation," and that it's helpful for skin, joint, and bone diseases.

One puzzling thing is that the news story I linked above says that "The oil's effectiveness is credited to its high concentration of a compound used to treat conditions like psoriasis and eczema.  European Union and U.S. regulators have deemed that compound a potential carcinogen, but it hasn't been linked to cancer."

Um.  It's a potential carcinogen, but hasn't been linked to cancer?  This is a little like saying that Donald Trump has been doing everything he can to favor Russian interests over those of Americans, but he's not actually pro-Russian and anti-American.

Oh, wait.  That's what he and his cronies are actually saying.

Never mind again.

This kind of bullshit even makes the wildlife facepalm.

On second thought, I'm not sure how reassuring it really is that people elsewhere in the world are exhibiting the same level of credulous idiocy we have here in the United States.  Wouldn't it nice if somewhere in the world, there was a country that based its decisions on rationality, that behaved nicely toward people and respected their rights, and that took into account long-term consequences instead of basing everything on short-term expediency?  Maybe the fact that we're all in the same slowly-sinking boat isn't really a cause for celebration.

In fact, now that I'm thoroughly depressed, I think I'll go take a nap.  Maybe I'll get lucky and my mattress will emit gamma rays, and I'll get superpowers.  Maybe I'll get to fly and shoot laser beams from my eyes.  That'd be handy.

Especially before the next "Make America Great Again" rally.

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This week's book recommendation is from one of my favorite writers and documentary producers, Irish science historian James Burke.  Burke became famous for his series Connections, in which he explored the one-thing-leads-to-another phenomenon which led to so many pivotal discoveries -- if you've seen any of the episodes of Connections, you'll know what I mean when I say that it is just tremendous fun to watch how this man's brain works.  In his book The Pinball Effect, Burke investigates the role of serendipity -- resulting in another tremendously entertaining and illuminating read.

Astronomical Whack-a-Mole

Because we all clearly needed something else to worry about, today we have: the mega-asteroids of doom.

This comes up because of a new program at NASA, now that the Trump administration has freed them from the necessity of worrying about climate change.  Called the "Large Synoptic Survey Telescope," this project involves building a huge telescope in Chile that will be looking for "potentially hazardous asteroids" (PHAs).  The idea is that they'll scan the sky looking for any hitherto-unrecorded astronomical object that shows apparent movement against the background stars in an hour.  "Anything that moves in just one hour," writes project leader Michael Lund, astrophysicist at Vanderbilt University, "has to be so close that it is within our Solar System."

It's not like this is an inconsequential threat.  Barringer Crater, in northern Arizona, is a huge hole in the ground that was caused by collision with a nickel-iron meteorite fifty meters in diameter.  The Chesapeake Bay Impact Event, about 35 million years ago, is 85 kilometers across, and was caused by an object about three kilometers wide -- the impact was enough to cause a tsunami that hit the Blue Ridge Mountains.  The mother of 'em all, though, is the 150 kilometer wide Chicxulub Crater, 66 million years ago, which blew up a layer of dust that settled out as clay all over the Earth -- and is thought to have kicked off the Cretaceous Extinction, the final straw for the dinosaurs (except for the ones who were the ancestors of modern birds).

What is cheering, however, is that these events aren't frequent.  The Chelyabinsk meteor of 2013, which exploded 32,000 meters above the Earth's surface but still was able to generate a shock wave big enough to injure 1,200 people.  The object that caused the blast is thought to have been about twenty meters across -- nothing compared to Chesapeake Bay and Chicxulub, but still a little on the scary side.

[Image courtesy of NASA/JPL]

No one doubts that there are lots of objects out there that could potentially play Whack-a-Mole with the Earth.  The LSST gives us hope of finding them before they find us.  The unfortunate part, however, comes when Lund addresses the question of what we could do about it if we discovered that a huge rock was on a collision course with Newark:

If an asteroid is on a collision course hours or days before it occurs, the Earth won’t have many options.  It’s like a car suddenly pulling out in front of you. There is little that you can do.  If, however, we find these asteroids years or decades before a potential collision, then we may be able to use spacecraft to nudge the asteroid enough to change its path so that it and the Earth don’t collide. 

This is, however, easier said than done, and currently, no one really knows how well an asteroid can be redirected.  There have been several proposals for missions by NASA and the European Space Agency to do this, but so far, they have not passed early stages of mission development.

 So it looks like if you found out that day after tomorrow, your home town was going to get clobbered, you'd have two options: (1) get in your car, drive like hell, and hope for the best; or (2) put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye.  I suppose that's better than nothing, especially considering that the alternative is thinking you're going to take a nice nap in your hammock and instead getting vaporized by an enormous superheated rock.

But even so, there's the problem of what it's going to be like for the rest of the Earth, the ones not in the impact zone.  Any impact -- even a relatively small one, like the one that formed Barringer Crater -- is actually going to have an enormous effect even on very distant places, just from the standpoint of kicking up a crapload of dust.  (Recall that when the volcano Tambora erupted in 1815, it caused "the Year Without a Summer," during which crops froze in mid-July and hundreds of thousands of people died of starvation.)

Nearer to the impact site, things get even worse.  Consider the Chelyabinsk meteor, which by comparison is a popgun -- not to mention the fact that it self-destructed 32,000 meters up, and never hit the surface.  The shock wave would be astronomical.  Pun intended.  Closer still, and the heat blast would flash-fry anything in its way.

You don't even get a pass if the impact is in the ocean, because then you've got hundred-foot-high tsunamis to worry about.

So yeah.  Not fun.

The best-case outcome, here, is that Lund and his colleagues scan the sky with the LSST for a while, and say, "Welp.  Nothing much out there.  I guess everything's hunky-dory.  As you were."  Or, that any projected impact will take place thousands of years from now.  (I figure that anyone around then will just have to fend for themselves.)  Or, perhaps, that we could use our technology to redirect the asteroid away from colliding with us.  Lund says this is already being looked into:

The B612 Foundation, a private nonprofit group, is also trying to privately raise money for a mission to redirect an asteroid, and they may be the first to attempt this if the government space programs don’t.  Pushing an asteroid sounds like an odd thing to do, but when we one day find an asteroid on a collision course with Earth, it may well be that knowledge that will save humanity.

I'll be watching the results, though, because being a little on the anxious, neurotic side, I definitely need another thing to keep me up at night.  On the other hand, it's at least temporarily taken my mind off all the other problems we're facing.  Which is good, right?

Of course right.

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This week's book recommendation is from one of my favorite writers and documentary producers, Irish science historian James Burke.  Burke became famous for his series Connections, in which he explored the one-thing-leads-to-another phenomenon which led to so many pivotal discoveries -- if you've seen any of the episodes of Connections, you'll know what I mean when I say that it is just mindblowing fun to watch how this man's brain works.  In his book The Pinball Effect, Burke investigates the role of serendipity -- resulting in another tremendously entertaining and illuminating read.

Mechanical brain transplant

New from the "Well, I can't see any way that could go wrong, do you?" department, we have: scientists growing Neanderthal brain fragments in petri dishes and then connecting them to crab-like robots.

My first thought was, "Haven't you people ever watched a science fiction movie?"  This feeling may have been enhanced by the fact that just a couple of days ago I watched the Dr. Who episode "The End of the World," wherein the Doctor and his companion are damn near killed (along with everyone else on a space station) when a saboteur makes the shields malfunction using little scuttling metallic bugs.

The creator of the Neanderthal brain bits is Alysson Muotri, geneticist at the University of California - San Diego's School of Medicine.  He and his team isolated genes that belonged to our closest cousins, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, and transferred them into stem cells.  Then, they allowed the cells to grow into proto-brains to see what sorts of connections would form.

Muotri says, "We're trying to recreate Neanderthal minds."  So far, they've noticed an abnormally low number of synapses (as compared to modern humans), and have speculated that this may indicate a lower capacity for sophisticated social behavior.

But Muotri and his team are going one step further.  They are taking proto-brains (he calls them "organoids") with no Neanderthal genes, and wiring them and his "neanderthalized" versions into robots, to make comparisons about how they learn.  Simon Fisher, a geneticist for the Department of Psycholinguistics at the Max Planck Institute, said, "It's kind of wild.  It's creative science."

That it is.

I have to admit there's a cool aspect to this.  I've always wondered about the Neanderthals.  During the peak of their population, they actually had a brain capacity larger than modern humans.  They clearly had culture -- they ceremonially buried their dead, probably had language (as they had the same variant of the "linguistic gene" FOXP2 that we do), and may have even made music, to judge by what appears to be a piece of a 43,000 bone flute that was found in Slovenia.

All that said, I'm not sure how smart it would be to stick a Neanderthal brain inside a metallic crab.  If this was a science fiction movie, the next thing that happened would be that Muotri would be in his lab late at night working with his Crab Cavemen, and he'd turn his back and they'd swarm him, and the next morning all that would be found is his skeleton, minus his femur, which would have been turned into a clarinet.

Okay, I know I'm probably overreacting here.  But it must be admitted that our track record of thinking through our decisions is not exactly unblemished.  Muotri assures us that these little "organoids" have no blood supply and therefore no potential for developing into an actual brain, but still.  I hope he knows what he's doing.  As for me, I'm going to go watch Dr. Who.

Let's see, what's the next episode?  "Dalek."  *reads description*  "A superpowerful mutant intelligence controlling a mechanical killing device goes on a rampage and attempts to destroy humanity."

Um, never mind.  *switches channel to Looney Tunes*

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This week's book recommendation is from one of my favorite writers and documentary producers, Irish science historian James Burke.  Burke became famous for his series Connections, in which he explored the one-thing-leads-to-another phenomenon which led to so many pivotal discoveries -- if you've seen any of the episodes of Connections, you'll know what I mean when I say that it is just tremendous fun to watch how this man's brain works.  In his book The Pinball Effect, Burke investigates the role of serendipity -- resulting in another tremendously entertaining and illuminating read.

Throw a war, nobody comes

Let's see... Fourth of July.  What shall I do today?  Picnic?  Barbecue?  Play with my dog?  Bonfire?  Go for a swim in my pond?  Shoot off some fireworks?

... or maybe... CIVIL WAR????  *diabolical laughter*

If this is the first you've heard about this, the same goes for me, and that's a little upsetting because I'm supposed to be participating in it, and evidently I missed the memo.  By this point, you probably won't be surprised to hear that the originator of this idea is none other than our friend and Skeptophilia frequent flyer Alex Jones, who had the following to say:

Here's the big announcement.  This July fourth, 2018, historically is the demarcation line.  You can mark as the point at which the global civil war against free humanity and pro-humanity, pro-Renaissance, classical liberal human future, versus the technocracy, the post-humanist, the post-industrialist, take-away-civilization eugenicists.  The Democrats are going to join with the real Nazis, that actually set Hitler up as a beta test -- that's on record -- posing as liberals.  You're either with the technocracy, with the human experimentists, or you're with the resistance.  It's much harder fixing things, and coming together, and believing in humanity, but we can do it, and we've done it, and Trump knows it.  It's about optimism, it's about a future.  We have everything we need, but it won't let the globalists be in total control any more.  No real competition.  So this is the choice you're getting.  July fourth is July fourth worldwide.  We've got to create some hashtags, get everyone involved, this is a time of not getting drunk, not eating a bunch of steaks or whatever.   That's a side issue.  We need to understand there's a global take down of nation states, a global takedown of populations, there is an attempt to get us all at each other's throats, by megabanks who are exempt from everything they're doing.  We have to get out that this is the beginning of a worldwide movement against empires, against royalty, against above-the-law bankers, against them all.  And it's a planetary awakening, 1776 worldwide.  It doesn't mean US control, it doesn't mean... uhhhhh... uhhhhh... no, it means the opposite.  It's soft power.  It's the next level of the Renaissance.... So this July fourth... uhhhhh.... how many years has it been since 1776?  Is it almost 250?  245 years?  Is t 245 years?  242.  I'm just going off the top of my head.  242...  You can mark this moment, July fourth, 242 years later, as the moment everyone will have to pick a side, whether you'll be a conformist with your own destruction, a conformist with the de-industrialization, the post-industrial world of the eugenicists, whether you're going to be strong and stand up to their bullying, stand up to the media, speak out for yourself, be involved, and be on Team Humanity.

Okay, that just leaves me with a few questions:

1. What?
2. What "record" shows that Hitler was a beta test by liberals?  The last thing I thought anyone would call Hitler is liberal.
3. Isn't Trump the one who's giving concessions to the megabanks hand-over-fist, such as the law he signed a month and a half ago weakening all the restrictions on risky speculation that were placed on large banks after the 2008 crash?
4. What?
5. So... instead of eating a bunch of steaks and getting drunk, we should create hashtags to stop global empires?  Because those are our two choices?
6. And all of this has to do with the Renaissance?  Like, Michelangelo and da Vinci and those guys?
7. What happens if it gets to July 5 and I haven't picked a side?
8. What is a "human experimentist?"
9. If I join Team Humanity, do I get a cool costume?  Like, brightly-colored tights with "TH" on the chest?  And a cape?  I've always thought I could seriously rock a cape.
10. What?

The thing that pisses me off the most about all this is that here I am, a fairly left-leaning guy, and there's going to be a Civil War waged by the left, and no one told me.  I mean, I signed up for #LiberalCivilWarTextAlerts and everything, and... nada.  I could have gotten out my musket and polished my bayonet and all, had my uniform dry-cleaned, and stored up some pemmican and beef jerky so I could survive the winter, and here I've been sitting on my ass drinking coffee and deciding how much potato salad to make.

How the hell am I supposed to wage a good war on the side of my Imperialist Eugenicist Post-Industrialist Above-the Law brethren if I only find out I'm involved the day it starts?

I swear, it's enough to make a guy think Alex Jones is pulling all this stuff out of his ass, or something.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Anyhow.  I'm pretty discouraged by this.  In fact, I'm pissed off enough that I think I might just sit this one out.  If the Super-evil Globalists can't even be bothered to let all of their Liberal Cronies know what they're planning, fuck 'em.  I'm just going to go with my original plan to go for a swim, play with my dog, and have a bonfire.

But when tomorrow comes, and everything is still pretty much loping along as it always has, there will be one thing we can count on; Alex Jones will never admit that he was wrong.  Just like he's been all the other times he's predicted that the Democrats were going to launch a war to end humanity.

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This week's book recommendation is from one of my favorite writers and documentary producers, Irish science historian James Burke.  Burke became famous for his series Connections, in which he explored the one-thing-leads-to-another phenomenon which led to so many pivotal discoveries -- if you've seen any of the episodes of Connections, you'll know what I mean when I say that it is just mindblowing fun to watch how this man's brain works.  In his book The Pinball Effect, Burke investigates the role of serendipity -- resulting in another tremendously entertaining and illuminating read.

Frequency flim-flam

One of the things that strikes me, both about many purveyors of alt-med bullshit and their customers, is how little effort they exert even to make their arguments sound like legitimate science.

I mean, it's not like the science is inaccessible, or something.  Whatever else you can say about Wikipedia, it's a pretty good resource for quick, substantially accurate information.  (In fact, a 2005 study found that Wikipedia was close to Encyclopedia Brittanica in terms of overall accuracy.)

So finding out how stuff works is, honestly, only a click away.  Which is why the link a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a couple of days ago is appalling on so many levels.

It's called "A Bright Future for Lyme -- AmpCoil."  What it claims is that it can reduce the symptoms of Lyme disease by 84-93% through "non-invasive sound wave vibrations" delivered by a "pulsed electromagnetic field."  I live in an area of the United States where Lyme is common, and have two friends who have struggled dreadfully with it, so naturally, I wanted to know what this was all about.  I clicked the "Science & Technology" link they provided.  Here's what I found:

When parts of your body become stressed or diseased, they no longer produce the correct sound vibrations.  In other words, your body and its organs are not vibrating at its optimal resonant frequency.  By introducing the tones of healthy organs, minerals, nutrients, electrolytes, enzymes, flora, etc. back into your body, you can relax knowing that the rejuvenation and restoration process is underway... 

All matter (everything around us) is a result of a frequency and if you amplify the frequency, the structure of the matter will vibrate and change.  To many, sound vibration is simply something you hear such as music.  The idea that frequency can have an effect on our familiar physical reality seems a far-fetched notion.  But it's not far-fetched at all - it's quantum mechanics! 

It’s hard to argue against the fact that music makes you feel good, but can sound vibration actually shift your body?  Everything in nature owes its existence solely and completely to frequency and sound vibration.  Sound is the basis for form and shape and the component that holds life together.

Well, I think this might be the odds-on favorite for the Most Highly Distilled Bullshit Ever contest.  Amongst the inaccuracies I found:

1. Disease has nothing to do with "resonant frequencies."  Resonant frequencies (also called natural modes of vibration) are the modes of vibration that an object tends to oscillate at in the absence of a driving or damping force.  A simple example is a child's swingset.  You may have noticed how hard it is to get a swing to oscillate at anything but one frequency -- this is because that is its resonant frequency, the one that requires the least amount of energy input.  It's true that everything has a particular resonant frequency, but it has nothing to do with disease, all it has to do with is mass distribution around the axis of oscillation, which is why you so seldom see sick swingsets.
2. "Amplifying the frequency" doesn't make things improve, all it does is (if you're talking about light) move it toward the violet end of the spectrum, or (if you're talking about sound) raise the pitch.  High frequencies aren't good and low frequencies bad, or else everyone would instinctively prefer piccolos over cellos.  If anything, I suspect the opposite is true.
3. Matter is not the "result of a frequency."  Matter, or at least its distinctive property of mass, is apparently the result of the interaction of its constituent fundamental particles with the Higgs field.  "Matter is a result of frequency" comes as close to a meaningless pseudoscience-babble statement as anything I can think of.
4. Sound vibrations and electromagnetic field vibrations are not the same thing.  At all.  Sound vibrations are compression waves in a medium such as air or water.  EMF vibrations are oscillating changes in the electromagnetic field in space (and do not require a medium to travel through, which mystified the hell out of scientists at the turn of the 20th century, until Einstein came along and said, "Hey, guys, take a look at this.")  Light is an example of an EMF oscillation.
5. Quantum mechanics has zero to do with the effect of sound waves on matter.
6. Sound vibrations have zero to do with holding matter together.

And that's just from the bit I posted.  If you'll check out the link, you'll see that it goes on for pages and pages in that fashion.  Along the way, you find out that the AmpCoil -- the thing they're peddling -- is supposed to cure not only Lyme disease, but fibromyalgia, headaches/migraines, chronic back pain, arthritis, and a host of autoimmune diseases.

One other statement from their home page stood out, that I just have to tell you about:

Imagine the possibilities if harmful pathogens could no longer hide from beneficial hertz frequencies by burrowing into cell walls?

From one sentence, I have two further responses:

1. What the fuck is a "hertz frequency?"  "Hertz" is the unit for measuring frequency.  So "hertz frequency" is a little like saying "inch distance" or "liter volume."
2. I'm not terribly concerned about Lyme pathogens burrowing into my cell walls, for the very good reason that my cells don't have cell walls, given that I'm not a plant.

Then, at the bottom of the page, in teensy print, is the following:

AmpCoil units have not been evaluated by governments and are Consumer Products for personal use.  Disclaimer: The AmpCoil System is not intended for use in the diagnosis, treatment, cure or prevention of any disease, medical condition, physical or psychological disorder.  It should not be considered a replacement for medical advice or treatment.

Say what?  What, exactly, do you call the following statements, taken right from their website?

• Safe & simple alternative Lyme treatment for everyone.
• The AmpCoil, powered by the BetterGuide App, can help reshape the form and function of vibrational imbalances in the body by re-tuning each and all parts of one’s physiology and anatomy.  AmpCoil is like a tuning fork for the human body!
• The AmpCoil is a non-invasive PEMF sound technology that brings the body back in tune, vibrating in its original, pure state faster than you might expect.

So okay, enough for the ranting.  But what appalls me about all of this is how quickly these claims would vanish into a puff of foul-smelling vapor if you just looked up some of this shit on Wikipedia.  That's all you have to do.  You don't need a Ph.D. in physics or biology.  You don't need to be a microbiologist.  You don't have to understand how to build a machine that can deliver a pulsed electromagnetic field.

All you have to be able to do is to go online and read critically for about five minutes.

What's worst is that there's legitimate research out there on the effect of electromagnetic field stimulation on a variety of disorders.  TCMS (trans-cranial magnetic stimulation) has shown promise in treating cases of intractable depression, for example.  But you will get nowhere (1) diagnosing yourself, and (2) buying an electric field generator, and (3) applying it to random body parts.  All that'll happen is either the placebo effect, or worse, you'll avoid getting legitimate medical care for an actual disease.

Amazingly, the scientists actually know what they're doing.  Listen to them.  [Image is in the Public Domain]

So that's today's dip in the deep end.  Bottom line: do some research.  If someone makes a claim, see if you can find independent corroboration.  And remember what Tim Minchin has to say about this kind of stuff: "There's a name for alternative medicine that works.  It's called... medicine."

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This week's book recommendation is from one of my favorite writers and documentary producers, Irish science historian James Burke.  Burke became famous for his series Connections, in which he explored the one-thing-leads-to-another phenomenon which led to so many pivotal discoveries -- if you've seen any of the episodes of Connections, you'll know what I mean when I say that it is just mindblowing fun to watch how this man's brain works.  In his book The Pinball Effect, Burke investigates the role of serendipity -- resulting in another tremendously entertaining and illuminating read.

The God-given right to abuse

In today's post, I'm going to allude to two news stories I ran across in the last couple of days that are so upsetting, so completely nausea-inducing, that I am going to omit most of the details and simply direct you to the links if you want to read more.  (If that disclaimer wasn't enough, let me be blunt: serious trigger warning regarding violence and abuse directed at children and teenagers.)

In the first, a man named Isauro Aguirre was just handed the death penalty in California because he had killed his girlfriend's eight-year-old son.  The reason?  He "thought the boy was gay."

The second was written by the young man who was the target of the abuse.  Rex Ogle, now 38 years old, was given forty-eight hours to leave his home with only what he could carry when he was eighteen.  For three months he lived on the street, eating out of trash cans, sleeping outside in all weather, until he broke down and called his grandmother for help.  The reason?

His stepmother had outed him to his father as gay, and his father told him, "If you choose to be gay, then you’re no longer part of this family.  You want to live that lifestyle?  Then do it somewhere else."

"In my father's defense," Ogle writes, "he had offered me a choice."  The choice was that he could leave, or remain part of the family -- as long as he attended church three times a week, asked a girl out and stayed with her (or another girl who was approved by his father), and he promised to "never seek to associate with a person of the homosexual persuasion."

In other words, lie to the world about who he is.  He realized he couldn't do that.  The result: forty-eight hours later, a man stood stern and dry-eyed while watching his own son walking down the driveway, weeping, carrying nothing but what he could fit in a backpack.

In both cases, the defense by the abuser was that "being gay is wrong."  God disapproves.  Therefore, a true believer has the license to abuse, and still claim that he's on the moral high ground.

Readers will no doubt be fast to point out two objections.

First, many Christians don't do this sort of thing.  Which I grant you.  I know many devout Christians who are, I'm sure, as disgusted by the abuse outlined above as I am.  However, one thing I don't hear often is those same Christians publicly denouncing the origin of such behavior -- and the church and political leaders who sanction it.

A second legitimate objection is that Christianity is hardly the only religion that has condoned violence against LGBTQ individuals.  Hell, in areas controlled by strict Muslims, gay men have been pitched off rooftops; if they survive the fall, they're stoned to death.  Which is certainly true.  But since when is "they're doing it too" any kind of justification?

So the general response is to defend evangelical Christianity against any responsibility for this sort of thing.  The interesting thing, however, is that the perpetrators of the abuse themselves are completely unequivocal as to where the reason comes from.  God told them it was the right thing to do, and their defense is "my holy book tells me what is right and wrong."

To which I respond: bullshit.

Sure, the Bible and the Qur'an both prohibit homosexuality.  The problem is, there are a whole lot of other things the Bible and the Qur'an prohibit that no one seems to take especially seriously, even the ones who call themselves fundamentalists.  I'll look at the biblical ones, because I'm not well-versed in the Qur'an, but I have no doubt the same is true there.  (Here's a list of some of the actions prohibited by the Qur'an, but be aware I haven't checked them for accuracy.)

Here are a few prohibitions from the Bible, along with the relevant verse:

• Eating shellfish.  (Leviticus 11:12)
• Tattoos.  (Leviticus 19:28)
• Marrying after getting a divorce.  (Mark 10:11-12)
• Women speaking in church.  (1 Corinthians 14:34-35)
• A man being uncircumcised. (Genesis 17:14)
• Lending money at interest. (about a dozen different verses address this, starting with Leviticus 25:37)
• Women braiding their hair, or wearing gold or pearls. (Timothy 2:9)
• Coming into church if you're handicapped or "have a blemish." (Leviticus 21:17-23)
• Praying in public. (Matthew 6:6)

The fact of the matter is, nobody's following the Bible to the letter.  All of the inconvenient stuff is simply ignored.  So is the stuff that could get you thrown in jail (such as owning slaves and/or killing them [Leviticus 25:44-46] and stoning disobedient children to death [Deuteronomy 21:18-21]).

So why all the focus on LGBTQ individuals?

Because the idea of two guys or two women having sex makes some people feel squinky.  It has nothing, nothing whatsoever, to do with the Bible.  If it did, you'd find the Westboro Baptist Church loonies waving signs around in front of Red Lobster, and way less of this kind of thing:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons A guy saved by Jesus, Romans cross tattoo, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Not to mention way fewer female televangelists like Leigh Valentine, Joyce Meyer, Paula White, and Joni Lamb.

I am sick unto death of people using their religion to justify being horrible to others.  I don't give a flying fuck what you think about what I should be doing with my naughty bits.  It is, frankly, none of your damn business.  There's also the issue that homosexuality has unequivocally been shown to be connected to brain wiring -- i.e., it isn't a choice and never has been.

So disowning or torturing and killing your own child because they're LGBTQ is about as moral as doing so because they have freckles or brown eyes, whatever the Bible says about it.

It is appalling that we are even still having to fight this battle.  A lot of my LGBTQ friends are petrified about the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy -- as conservative as he could be, he was at least a swing vote on social issues.  Now, with Donald Trump and his evangelical cronies to pick the next Supreme Court Justice?  No one really doubts that once they've established an ultraright majority, the first thing they'll topple is Roe v. Wade.

And the second thing they'll come after is LGBTQ rights.  In other words, unless we're very lucky, there'll be legal coverage for discrimination based upon sexual orientation.

I hope reading this has pissed you off enough to make your voice heard.  We are at a crossroads, I think, when we will either continue down the road of letting an amoral bunch of wannabe theocrats drive policy in this country, and move us further toward oppression and bigotry, or else enough people will stand up and say, "Stop.  Stop right here."

But that will only happen if we're willing to say that.  Loudly.  Over and over, and regardless of the personal consequences.  Otherwise, I fear that we're headed for a very dark period in history.

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This week's book recommendation is from one of my favorite writers and documentary producers, Irish science historian James Burke.  Burke became famous for his series Connections, in which he explored the one-thing-leads-to-another phenomenon which led to so many pivotal discoveries -- if you've seen any of the episodes of Connections, you'll know what I mean when I say that it is just mindblowing fun to watch how this man's brain works.  In his book The Pinball Effect, Burke investigates the role of serendipity -- resulting in another tremendously entertaining and illuminating read.